Continuation is a programming concept that allows a function to be paused, return control to the caller, and then later resume execution from where it left off. It's a way to write asynchronous code that looks and behaves like synchronous code, making it easier for developers to reason about the flow of their program without getting tangled up in callback hell or promise chains.

How to use it in a sentence

• "I was trying to debug this gnarly issue with the new feature, but I kept getting lost in all the continuations and async/await statements," grumbled the senior engineer as he stared bleary-eyed at his monitor.

• "We need to refactor this legacy codebase to use continuations instead of these nested callbacks," said the tech lead, rolling her eyes at the spaghetti code left behind by the previous team.

If you actually want to learn more...

• Ship / Show / Ask: This branching strategy combines pull requests with the ability to keep shipping changes, categorizing them as either "Ship" (merge without review), "Show" (open a PR but merge immediately), or "Ask" (open a PR for discussion before merging).

• Domain-Oriented Observability: This article describes a pattern to add business-relevant observability to your codebase in a clean, testable way, without cluttering it up with verbose logging and instrumentation calls.

• Canary Release: Canary release is a technique to reduce the risk of introducing a new software version by slowly rolling it out to a small subset of users before making it available to everyone, allowing you to catch issues early before they impact your entire user base.

Note: the Developer Dictionary is in Beta. Please direct feedback to skye@statsig.com.